Roumen.ganeff

DRM hacker Voksi, leader of renowned cracking group REVOLT, has revealed he is being sued by Denovo for repeatedly circumventing the company's anti-tamper software. "Police came yesterday and took the server pc and my personal PC. I had to go to the police afterwards and explain myself. " Voksi explains that he contacted Denuvo looking for a "peaceful resolution" but Denuvo reportedly responded that the matter will be decided by Bulgarian prosecutors. Voksi writes the they will no longer be able provide cracks for Denuvo DRM. "Sadly, I won't be able to do what I did anymore. I did what I did for you guys and of course because bloated software in our games shouldn't be allowed at all. Maybe someone will continue my fight." Discussion

I'll have to admit right up front that I don't use Instagram and don't really feel any need to. With that said I'm amazed that a person can make the kind of money they do on a social media platform just posting something. I looked at the rich list and didn't recognize many of them and the ones I did surprised me with their posting fee. I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it's obvious someone likes what they say or they wouldn't make that kind of cash. Viva la capitalism! Check out the listing here if interested. While in some strange way it makes sense that brands would want to pay celebrities and soccer stars exorbitant fees to casually mention their love of some weird tooth whitener on Instagram, it's the average joes-turned-influencers that make you re-think all your life choices. Discussion

Under a new legislation, French students will be prohibited from using smartphones and tablets while at school. The law, which was originally parceled in President Emmanuel Macron's election campaign, was elevated to a matter of public health amidst...

If you’ve been bargain shopping for one of the Great Houses of Westeros, get ready for the deal of a lifetime.

Gosford Castle, a 19th-century country house in Northern Ireland that was used to portray the Riverrun castle on Game of Thrones, is for sale and accepting offers over £500,000 (or $656,452), according to its online listing.

Riverrun, first depicted in season 3 of the acclaimed series, is the former seat of House Tully, and the current lawful home to House Frey. While the castle itself is not often seen on the show, its occupation has long been the subject of strategic interest for the series’ main characters.

The real castle was built in the mid-1800s by the second Earl of Gosford, Archibald Acheson, and housed the Earls of Gosford through 1921. Over the years, the estate has also been used as a prisoner of war camp (both during World War II and later the Northern Ireland Conflict), a storage facility for public records, a barracks for soldiers, and even a hotel. In 1986, the grounds became Northern Ireland’s first conservation forest.

While the property currently lacks heating, the castle does include 15 bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, and, of course, bragging rights among the Game of Thrones fandom.

Gosford has been converted into six luxury apartments, each given Thrones-worthy names like “The Inner Bailey,” “The Round Tower,” and “The Old Keep.” Each apartment is 3,500 square feet, with some offering rooftop gardens to residents.

Be sure to check out the listing, as it may just be the only opportunity to live in House Tully without fear of the White Walkers.

The main ensemble cast of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise has released a joint statement showing support for James Gunn following his firing from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Sean Gunn, Pom Klementieff, and Michael Rooker have all signed a statement saying that they all "fully support James Gunn." Alongside the statement, Pratt's tweet and Instagram post of it explicitly mentions that the star would "personally love to see him reinstated as director of Volume 3." Bautista similarly tweeted out the letter with the hashtags #IStandWithJamesGunn and #RehireJamesGunn (and #WeAreGroot for good measure).

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In this new Christopher Robin featurette, Ewan McGregor sits down with talking some stuffed animals and proceeds to interview them. It’s painfully adorable, and charming, and you owe it to yourself to watch it. Plus: check out a clip from the film, and another behind-the-scenes featurette.

Christopher Robin Featurette 

Oh my god, this is almost too much. I don’t know if I can handle it. This achingly cute featurette has Ewan McGregor interviewing his “co-stars” from Christopher Robin. Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and Eeyore are all on hand to talk about their acting methods and the process of getting into character. It is charming as hell. Pooh gets distracted thinking about lunch. Piglet has to sit on some books. It’s killing me with kindness, folks. Look – I’m a cynical, grumpy guy. But even my ice cold heart is melted by this. Just watch it and enjoy how damn nice it is.

Christopher Robin Featurette 2

But wait, there’s more! This “Wisdom of Pooh” featurette is a brief-but-enjoyable behind-the-scenes look at the film, where Ewan McGregor breaks down what the movie is about. And points out that Winnie the Pooh’s very laid-back, honey-based existence is ideal. “It’s about something we could all use a bit more at the moment,” McGregor says. “Slowing things down and realizing what’s important in our lives.” God damn it, this movie is going to make me cry, isn’t it? Stop it, Christopher Robin. I’m on to you.

Christopher Robin Clip

Finally, this Christopher Robin clip has Christopher Robin telling Pooh to keep a low-profile in public, lest people freak out about witnessing a talking stuffed animal. Needless to say, Pooh doesn’t quite understand this request. It’s quick, it’s cute, it’s more proof this movie is going to give you “the feels”, as the youths of today say. Everything I’ve seen regarding this movie has struck the right note. I know several people have called Pooh’s appearance “creepy”, but I really don’t get that. I also remember that when the first look at Paddington arrived, the internet called Paddington’s look “creepy” as well. There were memes and everything. And we all know by now that didn’t turn out to be the case. So maybe just cool your jets, internet. That’s all I’m saying.

Christopher Robin opens August 3, 2018.

In the heartwarming live action adventure Disney’s “Christopher Robin,” the young boy who shared countless adventures with his band of lovable stuffed animals in the Hundred Acre Wood is now grown up and living in London but he has lost his way. Now it is up to his childhood friends to venture into our world and help Christopher Robin rediscover the joys of family life, the value of friendship and to appreciate the simple pleasures in life once again.

The post Watch Ewan McGregor Interview Winnie the Pooh and Friends in this ‘Christopher Robin’ Featurette appeared first on /Film.

Imagine that you are the owner of Gary’s Shoes, and that you want to get data from all of your multitudes of stores into a centralized location. You’ll use that data to make decisions, predict future trends, etc. Given that each store must operate independently, you have a server in each location that will push up it changes (and get updates from) the HQ cluster. You can see an example of this kind of setup in this post.

This work quite well, but it does require the user to be aware of a potential issue. When you have a massively distributed data flow process setup, you need to also pay attention for the quite in the noise. What do I mean by that?

One of our customers have RavenDB deployed to tens of thousands of locations worldwide. At any given time, you are going to have at least some of those locations unavailable. In some locations, part of closing down for the day means literally flipping the master switch on electricity for the entire building. On others, you might have someone tripping over the router or have some local or regional network outage.

Part of the strategy for dealing with such a data set, coming from so many separate locations, is the need to monitor when we aren’t getting data. The fact that on most of our locations we have near real time data is very powerful for the business. But you also need to see where you aren’t getting the data from and setup proper alerts and monitoring for the missing data. From a business perspective, it is also advisable to surface that kind of detail all the way to the user. If you are going to be ordering inventory for the stores in a particular state, but the two major stores in the area are down because of a network issue and has been down for two days now, you want to be aware of that and figure out that you are working on out of date data.

To be honest, the issues isn’t so much about two days of lag in the case of once in blue moon type of error. In the scenario outlined above, in pretty much all business scenarios that I can think of, you won’t really see any impact on the decision making of the organization.

The killer is when you have some sort of a problem that goes on for a while. A DNS update that was missed because of bad DNS cache policy, for example. Now your updates to HQ go into the void in a consistent basis. On the other hand, everything else continue to function properly both locally and for HQ. If this isn’t accounted for, it is easy to miss this for a long period of time. I have seen such a case that was only discovered when the year’s end numbers didn’t quite match up what they were supposed to. Given that this was the second year in a row this happened, the investigation found that some network issue indeed cause a very long term topology failure. This was actually properly reported, in a log file that no one ever read.

Lesson learned, make sure that part of your data flow strategy accounts for such things and bring them to the users’ attention. Actually resolving the issue was a network configuration change that took minutes and the entire dataset was synchronized within a few hours afterward. But finding out that there was even a problem took effectively forever.

Part of the job of a product owner is to pay attention to the list of issues in the issue tracker. Not just to get a feeling for the cadence of the project, but to have an impact on its direction.

Paying attention to the issues doesn’t mean just tracking down what bugs are still opened, mind. Consider the case of a product owner with the release due date looming over the horizon, you need to start looking at the list of remaining issues and take active steps to make sure that you are going to get done more or less on time.

The usual rules apply, chose any 2 of:

• Speed
• Quantity
• Quality

In other words, your team can deliver more features in time, if you are willing to sacrifice quality. On the other hand, they can keep high quality and the same number of features, but the due date will have to move.

As an aside, it is possible to get all three of these aspects at once, but only for a very short amount of time (few days to a week or two at most), but at a very high long term cost.

One of the things that I observed is that in some cases, a lot of complexity and work is in the last 2% of work, where all the the polish work and rough edge cases lurks. In some respects, this is actually a really good thing. Because it gives the product owner the chance to remove features that won’t usually have an explicit impact on the users.  A good example for this in RavenDB would be the amount of time and effort we put into the intellisense feature of RQL queries in the studio. That falls under the Nice To Have set of features. It is unlikely that we’ll get many upset users if the intellisense isn’t up to part with something like Visual Studio or ReSharper, so beyond getting some basic functionality right, we can defer improvements there if we don’t have the extra capacity to complete this by the expected date.

I’m sure that you can think of other examples in your own projects. Note that this require you to understand what exactly your users are valuing your software for. In the case of RavenDB, adding more query functionality and speeding up overall system performance ranks much higher than adding extra smarts to intellisense that is mostly used during exploration / demos.

On the other hand, the effect of the pushing such features down the road accumulate over time. In other words, if you keep your priorities straight and select which features should go into the product, you will defer the small fries over and over. At some point, you’ll need to make a decision about them. You can either decide that they don’t make sense anymore or they are never really going to be important enough to actually put in the “let’s get this done” queue.

Alternatively, you might want to put them in the idle bin. In other words, whenever you have an idle portion in your development, you can peek into the idle bin and get some tasks from there. That is also a good place to have a new team member start from. These are tasks that are minor and not that important, after all, so they can use that to learn the codebase. In fact, we have used this in the past as the tasks bin for interns. That is usually a really good fit, for the same reason that they are good tasks for a new team member with the added benefits that they are usually well scoped and if the intern messes up, you didn’t lose too much.

Regardless, the idle bin notion is important, because otherwise your future tasks queue is going to grow larger and larger, and it will be ever harder to figure out what tasks actually matter.

Star Wars: Episode IX will begin production on August 1st, Lucasfilm announced today. The film will also feature a surprising cast member: Carrie Fisher will reprise the role of Leia, using footage she previously shot for The Force Awakens. We heard...

The woman who inspired the drama will finally appear on it, too.

The CBS drama announced Tuesday via Twitter that former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, and Madeleine Albright will appear in the season 5 premiere of Madam Secretary.

We've got some BIG guest stars in store for Season 5! Former Secretaries of State @HillaryClinton, @Madeleine, and… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…—
Madam Secretary (@MadamSecretary) July 24, 2018

This is a first for Clinton but not for Albright, who appeared on the show in 2015. It’s the perfect place for former secretaries of state to drop by since Tea Leoni  plays Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord on the drama.

“Having three powerhouses of diplomacy agree to come on our show is awe-inspiring and humbling. And that we were able to find a time in their busy schedules when they were all available is a miracle,” executive producer Lori McCreary said in a statement.

It’ll be a big season for Elizabeth on Madam Secretary. At the end of last season, she revealed her plans to run for president. Executive producer/creator Barbara Hall told EW that this coming season will be “about the State Department, because she still has her job. But we will pull back the curtain on what the process is, once someone decides to run. We really like to reveal process on this show, so we’ll will start the research and do stories about what she discovers along the way.”

Russian hackers infiltrated the control rooms of US utility companies last year, reaching a point where they "could have thrown switches," The Wall Street Journal reports. The paper cites officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confi...

Astrophotography requires abundant patience and planning, but as Spanish photographer Dani Caxete has shown, you sometimes need quick reflexes, too. His entry in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2018 contest shows the International Space Statio...

Chrome has already taken numerous measures to inform users if they're on an unencrypted HTTP website, but from today it's going one step further, displaying a warning whenever you visit an unsecure site. Instead of a green padlock and the word "secur...

Days ago, the EU Commission fined Google a record-setting €4.3 billion ($5 billion) for antitrust violations. Now it's handed down a combined €111 million in fines to four electronics manufacturers for fixing online resale prices for their...

Anti-piracy tech company Denuvo isn't messing around when it comes to game hackers. It touts its digital rights management (DRM) tool as uncrackable and for the most part, it held up for years. But in 2016, a Bulgarian games cracker called Voksi mana...

If you're a car person, you've at least looked at a Lamborghini and wondered, "Are they as awesome as the mystique around them?" Sure, they conjure up images of guys wearing too much cologne while blasting bad covers of popular songs over an EDM beat...

Today's stock crash in Facebook shares was one of the worst shellackings we have seen in the technology sector all year. The company warned investors on their earnings conference call that growth is slowing and they even missed Wall Street's expectations for daily active users. Facebook saw a decline in usage in Europe and growth is flatlining here in the United States. This added up to an 18.96% decline in one day for Facebook shareholders.

Facebook's stock (FB) is the first stock in history to shed over $100 billion in market capitalization in one day. This is not a superlative that any company wants to hold, and CNBC put the drop into context.

Facebook's massive stock crash today puts it ahead of Intel's crash back in the year 2000. Intel shed over $90 billion in market cap on that day. The company's weak revenue guidance for the back half of the year has investors fleeing the stock and it doesn't appear that there is any reason to take a chance buying it here. Facebook is currently rated Hold at Game Trader, but I will be taking a closer look at a potential downgrade in the near future.

Today's news comes a week after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended the rights of Holocaust deniers on his platform. Time will tell if this was the all-time high for the social media company's stock. Facebook is still wildly profitable, and this kind of reset of expectations may be what was needed for the company to inch higher in market cap in the long run. Facebook is still valued at over $500 billion, so the market isn't pricing in a death spiral just yet.

A blockchain startup called Tron has closed its deal to buy the file-sharing service BitTorrent. Neither side disclosed how much Tron paid, but TechCrunch reports the price was around $126 million in cash. BitTorrent's staff will work out of Tron's S...

The Food and Drug Administration has finally given Impossible Burger's plant-based meat its stamp of approval. Impossible Foods submitted the meat substitute for review back in 2014, but the FDA responded with concerns that its key ingredient, a prot...

If there's a way to steal money on the internet you can bet it's going to happen. According to the DoJ a criminal gang mostly in the Middle East and SE Asia islaundering money through mobile games using fake Apple accounts. They establish iOS accounts with valid email addresses and then associate stolen credit cards to those accounts. They purchase game features and premiums then sell them for good old hard cash. The experts who discovered this scheme say Apple is partially at fault for failing to properly vet the credit cards used by the crooks. To top things off this scam is still in operation. This is why we can't have nice things. The activity of the criminal gang behind the operation is simple as effective. Crooks used a special tool to create iOS accounts using valid emails accounts, then they associated with the accounts the stolen payment cards. Most of the created accounts are specific to users located in Saudi Arabia, India, Indonesia, Kuwait, and Mauritania. Discussion

Alphabet's Project Loon was a big success in Puerto Rico after they were hit by a hurricane last year and the folks in Kenya took note of this success. As a matter of fact they liked it so much that they are going to bring this balloon borne internet system to help achieve full internet coverage for their population. These balloons float at 60,000 feet and provide 4G wireless coverage. Further, I expect we'll see more of these third world countries jump on this type of service since the infrastructure required is pretty slim. Keep up the good work you Loons! "We will work very hard with Loon, to deliver the first commercial mobile service, as quickly as possible, using Loon's balloon-powered Internet in Africa," said Aldo Mareuse, the chief executive of Telkom. Discussion

Blowing stuff up has been a great source for technology advancements for decades now. Los Alamos National Lab has the below video posted that very lightly touches on on some incredible tech that utilizes Vector Particle-In-Cell (VPIC) formulas produced back in the 1950s. The Trinity supercomputer has new world record of creating 1 trillion files in two minutes successfully. The files all represent an individual particle's trajectory, velocity, temperature, and spin among other data points. A Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist having trouble solving a stubborn research problem needed some help – his scientific simulations had generated a sea of data, but it took so long to search the data that he couldn't find the information he needed. He found himself looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. At the same time, the lab's storage research team had been hard at work on another classic big data problem: creating massive numbers of files as quickly as possible. The day the team met with the scientist, you could say that Big Science and Big Data put their heads together – and now they're making history. Discussion

Scraping bots are nothing new. These bots move all over the internet, and are used by tons of companies to collect data on just about everything you can think of. If you are not in the know about scraping bots, Wired has write-up that will tell you all you need to know, and likely why you don't really care, unless of course you use price comparison sites that are generally built on scraping. Companies like Amazon and Walmart have internal teams dedicated to scraping, says Alexandr Galkin, CEO of the retail price optimization company Competera. Others turn to companies like his. Competera scrapes pricing data from across the web, for companies ranging from footwear retailer Nine West to industrial outfitter Deelat, and uses machine-learning algorithms to help its customers decide how much to charge for different products. Discussion

Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki has released a blog post and video detailing some of the viewer count stats that the company has tabulated over the past year. 1.9 billion logged in viewers visit the video streaming website each month and watch 180 million hours of video each day. There has been a 35% rise in the number of people who make a 5 digit salary from Youtube and a 40% rise in the amount of people that make a six digit salary from the service. Livestreaming on the site has increased by 10X over the past 3 years. Those stats show the incredible amount of growth that has occurred in the platform. Famebit - Acquired by Google in 2016, FameBit has been helping brands tap into YouTube's audience by using creator's authentic voices to develop unique branded content at scale. Over half of channels that used Famebit in the first three months of 2018 doubled their YouTube revenue. In the coming months, we'll be launching a feature that will allow users to easily shop for products, apps or tickets directly from the creator watch page. Discussion

Are you in need of a few moments of relaxation? Then look no further. Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands covers about 56 square kilometers and, surprisingly, did not exist until the polder was created in 1968.  Amazingly it is now internationally important as a waterfowl habitat.  Benfilm visited this amazing place in May of 2018 and this beautiful, peaceful and relaxing video footage is the result.  Go and get a cup of something to sip while you reflect on the beauty we still have in this world…

“You are in breach of condition 15.4(c) of your agreement with PayPal Credit,” the letter said, “as we have received notice that you are deceased.” Not only that, it continued, “[t]his breach is not capable of remedy.” Despite the recipient’s status as no longer living, the letter included an instruction to “READ THIS NOTICE CAREFULLY.” [Kevin Underhill, Lowering the Bar; Leo Kelion, BBC]

PayPal says U.K. customer breached her contract by dying is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

In The Good Place season 2 finale, Ted Danson was back where everyone knows his name, but it turns out that the Cheers alum was “horrified” to do so.

The cast and creator of The Good Place stopped by EW’s Comic-Con panel in San Diego on Saturday, where they briefly talked season 3 (Eleanor and company are on Earth) but mostly looked back on the season 2 finale, which included Michael (Danson) intervening in Eleanor’s (Kristen Bell) life back on Earth by posing as a bartender. The idea to see Danson, who starred for 11 seasons on Cheers, once again serving drinks was a dream come true for Michael Schur.

“We had this idea that Michael needed to go to Earth and intervene in Eleanor’s life in a place where Eleanor might need to talk to a stranger and the obvious thing was a bar,” the show’s creator told EW’s Sam Highfill. “So I kind of asked Ted for his permission a little bit. I felt that it wouldn’t be fair to just throw Ted Danson behind a bar. I kind of asked and he said, of course, yes, it was great. Personally for me, seeing Ted throw a towel over his shoulder… I actually wrote it in the script. In the stage direction, it said you were cutting limes because in my memory…” Danson interjected, “That’s all I did — cut limes and drink soda.”

And while it might have been wish fulfillment for Schur, it was a nightmare for Danson. “It was horrifying for me,” revealed the 70-year-old actor. “For some reason I just started to… It took me so long to get used to being the bartender on Cheers and being cool and all that stuff that it just horrified me to go back and I felt all thumbs. It turned out great, but it was horrifying.”

EW is live from Comic-Con 2018! Click here to watch interviews with your favorite stars LIVE on Facebook July 19-22.

The Good Place returns to NBC in the fall. Watch the full video above.

Actor Nathan Fillion and director Allan Ungar appeared on IGN Live at Comic-Con 2018 on Thursday to promote their new Uncharted fan film, which has taken the internet by storm since it was posted online July 16.

One question fans have had about the film is what Uncharted game developer Naughty Dog would think of Ungar and Fillion's unofficial movie treatment of their franchise.

According to Ungar, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive: "Amy Hennig, who I guess created the characters, she tweeted me. And she thought it was fantastic. It warmed her heart to see this 13 years later. Said ‘our baby,’ something like that."

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James Gunn has been fired as director of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 according to THR on Friday.

Controversial tweets were circulated by conservative personalities on Twitter in which Gunn made jokes about topics such as rape and pedophilia primarily during the years of 2008 and 2009.

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